TPWD Study On Gar Continues At Falcon

Drought has been deadly to bass, but a giant predator is also a prime suspect.

The Bassmaster Elite Series put Falcon Lake on international radar in 2008. That's the year veteran angler Paul Elias won a four-day Elite Series tournament on Falcon with a record 132 1/2 pounds for a total of 20 fish.

There was a 13-pounder caught in the tournament, another Elite Series record. Eleven anglers other than Elias caught more than 100 pounds of fish, and the top six broke the previous record for a four-day event.

In 2012, it seemed fitting that Bassmaster Magazine ranked Falcon, on the Texas-Mexico border near Zapata, as America's top bass-fishing lake. Since then, Falcon has been in a drought-induced tailspin. In 2014,

Falcon has never been more than 40 percent full. It is currently about 31 feet low, which is 7 feet higher than in June 2013.

According to Texas Parks and Wildlife Department surveys, the bass population is down 65 percent from the glory days. Logically, that's what happens when bass try to spawn in declining water levels. Falcon has now lost multiple year-classes of fish.

The lake loses more fish each day to angling mortality. Even if an angler releases the fish, a certain percentage will die from stress (particularly in summer, when the heat is brutal) or damage from the hook.

A few bass are eaten by larger predators, like alligator gar. In fact, some anglers around Falcon Lake are convinced that big gar caused the bass decline. Alligator gar may grow to 200 pounds, after all, and eat any fish they can catch.

Previous alligator gar diet studies at four East Texas lakes in the 1970s, Sam Rayburn Lake in the 1980s and Choke Canyon Lake in the 1990s indicate they don't catch many bass.

All those studies showed that game fish were not common in an alligator gar's diet. All game fish comprised 4.4 percent of food items in the 1970s study, largemouth bass comprised 3.4 percent of food items in the 1980s study, and no largemouth bass were found in alligator gar stomachs in the 1990s study at Choke Canyon Lake, within 100 miles of Falcon.

This is a new decade, though — a new millennium, even — so TPWD is updating the gar diet study, this time at Falcon Lake. It's the right thing to do. They have concerned anglers who buy fishing licenses to fish at a lake that just three years ago was ranked as the best in America.

Spencer Dumont, regional fisheries director for the western part of Texas, said there was a gar diet study at Lake Guerrero, in Mexico, that showed alligator gar consuming a much higher percentage of largemouth bass — 51 percent, in fact.

That study done by Texas A&M graduate students looked at stomach contents of 60 alligator gar caught by commercial fishermen and found bass to be the dominant food fish.

"Because Guerrero is in the vicinity of Falcon, it is considered by some to be similar to Falcon," Dumont said. "With the uproar over gar eating the bass, we decided to take a look at their diet at Falcon while collecting other data from the gar."

The only way to know what a gar eats is to kill the fish and cut it open. Even then, it can be difficult to identify partially digested prey species. Biologists collected 80 alligator gar in April. Most of their stomachs were empty, and they're still working up the numbers of identified game fish. In October 2013, biologists found one bass in 10 gar stomachs. Eighteen other alligator gar that were killed in that fall collection had empty stomachs.

In October, the big gar were eating carp and tilapia. In April, gizzard shad were added to the carp and tilapia menu. Dumont said TPWD plans to collect more gar in June and August, up to 100 fish per collection effort, if they can catch that many.

They'll be up to their elbows in gator gar guts, trying to identify and record everything they find. In the meantime, a rainy summer would be a huge bonus for Falcon and other Texas lakes.